Marketing departments may understand the value of content, but what about your sales team? Using content in sales follow-up, whether it’s videos or blog articles, can actually help make their jobs easier.

From educating new leads or re-engaging prospects that have gone dark…marketing content can bolster your salespeople, too.

Sales are key to any company; no sales means no revenue means no business.

So if you somehow speed up the sales process, you’re going to start bringing in more buyers.

Got a lot of common inquiries that you find yourself forced to address over and over again? Ask your marketing team to create content accordingly!

List out the top five or top ten questions you find yourself repeatedly answering.

If you have a video or blog article or landing page for every question, imagine how much faster you’ll be able to respond to those common requests!

Remember our recent episode with Kobalt Tools? Danny was chatting recently recently with a lead who was considering their own video series. So he sent that episode straight to the prospect: boom! Question answered, instantly!

Sometimes it’s even worth it to have a piece of material for people who contact you about the wrong product or service, if they do it often enough.

For example, Optimum Productions (the source of our lovely studio set) used to get a lot of calls or emails from Michael Jackson fans, asking about his Thriller video. Why? Because that video happened to be made by an Optimum Productions Inc. way back in the day. Ouch.

But lately, Optimum has managed to cut those solicitations almost in half. How? They just made a small landing page for anyone who happens to search their site for the term, “michael jackson.”

The page took almost no effort at all – and it’s benefitted the studio greatly by reducing the number of calls from fans, thus cutting down on wasted time.

Answering questions doesn’t have to be the sole purpose of content. It’s easy to respond when leads reach out to you and begin a conversation, but you don’t necessarily always have to wait for that to happen.

If you think an article or video may be valuable to a prospect that you want to reach, take the initiative and send it as a conversation-starter.

The content doesn’t even have to be yours!

We often send materials made by others to our own prospects. And we certainly don’t object if you share our podcast with a lead if you think it will help them!

If someone sends you a relevant piece of information that provides value, you’ll be more inclined to listen to them next time they offer more help.

Of course, no matter how much you try, some people just aren’t ready to make a purchase.

Many B2B companies or industrial manufacturers have very, very long buying cycles, and there’s not much you can do to change that. But you can make sure prospects will come to you when they are ready to shop again.

As opposed to generic newsletters sent to everyone on your email list, try delivering a personalized message with relevant content to an individual prospect every now and then.

Don’t send a follow-up without a point.

Use valuable content in sales follow-up so you stay top-of-mind during that ‘dead period’.

The more you educate your prospects on their own time, the faster you’ll get to a more meaningful conversation with them.

It’s the same song, second verse, which our show has pushed for some time now.

Provide value…because content is king.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!

We all know what blogs are – heck, you’re reading one right now! Just about anyone with surface-level knowledge of the internet is aware of “weblogs,” which in the most technical sense are online articles posted on websites in order to generate discussion.

But why should manufacturers honestly care about blogs?

After all, manufacturers aren’t necessarily interested in writing – that’s why they chose a different career, rather than journalism or literature.

But if you’re interested in attracting more customers and closing more sales…then you may have to give blogs another serious look.

Even if you’re a manufacturer, you can in fact generate leads with blog articles; and better still, they will be qualified leads.

When you need a question answered or when you’re considering making some sort of purchase, where’s one of the first (if not the first) place you look for answers?

The internet.

Even if you’re not ready to buy yet, you want to at least have the resources to make an informed decision…and so do your leads.

Consider your buyer personas, which we discussed last week. Most of them are probably online even more than you are.

Blogs provide the information for prospects to gather and educate themselves on their own time.

By providing the answers that people are looking for, you can help transform marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads…all without lifting a finger!

But don’t worry – that doesn’t mean your sales team will be made obsolete; they’ll actually become more effective.

Blogs are valuable resources that your sales and marketing team can use to answer questions more swiftly, with much less effort.

Instead of spending ten minutes answering the same question over and over again, sales reps can answer that common question with a push of a button – or the leads can find it themselves without ever having to reach out.

When leads finally are ready to buy, the sale will go much smoother and much faster – because they understand what’s going on!

Now, instead of spending the majority of their time hand-holding with potential customers on a one-on-one basis, your sales team can be speaking with sales-qualified leads who have already made 80% of their decision based on their own findings.

Some companies have even told us that their normally-six-month buying process has been shortened to three months with leads that come in digitally.

That’s because buyers can take in all the information they want and need, with blog articles.

Some people are afraid to try and start a blog, because they fear that any poor content will damage their reputation. But that’s not true.

Having no online articles can be just as bad, or perhaps even worse, than having sub-par articles.

Your blogs – or lack thereof – affects your credibility in the eyes of potential buyers.

If your posts provide the valuable answers that your prospects are looking for, they’ll be more likely to trust your expertise and eventually approach you when they’re ready to buy.

Just check out the numbers according to Hubspot: “Companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.”

Simple math. If you can generate leads with blog articles, then the more blogs you release, the larger your content library grows, and the more credible your website becomes.

That means you’ll start ranking higher and higher with search engines like Google. And the higher you rank, the more people will encounter you when they’re searching for answers. Hopefully, your materials will rise all the way to the top of the first page!

And if your blogs aren’t there…someone else’s blogs are.

And they may be your competitors’.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!

One of the major game-changers in digital marketing is knowing to whom you’re marketing. Who you’re aiming for will drastically affect how you attempt to reach them. Therefore, the best way to nail down your audience is by building buyer personas.

Before you take a single step with any campaign, it’s vital to identify your target market and clarify specific traits they may possess.

Personas aren’t just important for B2C companies (can you imagine a retailer trying to reach preteen girls with gritty hard rock and macho rhetoric?).

Your B2B practice may actually have multiple types of target audiences, but clarifying and differentiate them will help you change your messaging from widespread buckshot to highly-accurate sniper rounds.

So who are the people you’re trying to reach?

Are they male? Female? How old are they? What’s their job title?

Knowing simple demographics like these, as well as where they’re starting in your sales funnel, can go a long way to helping you nail down what will or won’t fly with them.

So let’s say you’ve narrowed down the field somewhat. You have identified four types of buyers for your product: a new kind of CNC machine or endmill, for example.

Now you have to think about what each person tends to prioritize.

You might sell directly to a floor operator, who cares about ease of use and ergonomic benefits.

But supposing that end-user doesn’t have final say, or isn’t part of the buying process?

Maybe the person you have to convince is actually the plant supervisor, who prioritizes efficiency and wants to hear or see case studies from you.

Or perhaps you need the stamp of approval from the CFO, who’s focused on expenses. They want to know how long before your machine pays for itself. What’s the return on investment look like?

And even beyond that, you may find yourself dealing directly with the CEO, who wants to deal with a company that has only the highest reputation, or has already established a reliable relationship via previous deals. They care about the ease of deployment, perhaps, rather than the initial expense of the partnership.

Even within a single company, that’s four personas who may purchase the very same product from you…but for drastically different buying reasons.

Knowing what your personas want will help you know what type of information and content to deliver, so you’re not pitching the right product to the right crowd by advocating the wrong benefits.

This question often gets overlooked once a persona has been otherwise identified. You know what to say and to whom you want to say it – but it’s important to actually make sure they receive your marketing message.

If you’re trying to reach 50+ year-old welders, Snapchat probably isn’t the way to go.

Trade magazine ads may no longer be the way to get in front of a young-30s CFO.

So where do your personas spend the majority of their time?

Are they reading magazines? Could they be the chosen staff member to represent their company at trade shows?

They might be stuck behind a computer all day. Or perhaps they’re constantly on the go with only a mobile phone to connect with the outside world.

Do they spend the majority of their time on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, or some even-newer platform?

Wherever they are – that is where you and your content must go.

A major reason to sit down and hash this out is because, most of the time, what appeals to your target audience may not appeal to you.

You may have to swallow your pride and adjust accordingly.

It’s perfectly alright to re-package the same or similar content for each different platform – the key is to make sure that it’s actually getting in front of the right people.

Knowing who your audience is, what they want, and where to find them is vital to actually reaching them. Especially if you want to make sure that no marketing dollar goes to waste along the way.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!

This week we were joined by Jonathan Bradshaw, product manager at Kobalt Tools, to discuss how companies can leverage customer stories. Kobalt is a private brand belonging to Lowe’s®, and they’re approaching their twenty-year anniversary.

Danny first discovered Kobalt through their videos on social media. Specifically, he found them through their Kobalt Artisans series on Facebook.

The series isn’t about the tools. In fact, the brand is hardly mentioned or promoted for the majority of the videos. The videos focus on the unique projects of workers and craftsmen.

In other words, Kobalt is focused on how to leverage customer stories to portray their products at work. Everyone at Kobalt, from the engineers to the designers, are entirely oriented around the user experience of their customers.

As a private brand, Kobalt didn’t necessarily have the same huge marketing budget as their competitors. So they decided on the age-old adage, “Show; don’t tell.”

The tools are of course shown in-use during the videos, but in a single four-minute video they may only be shown for a total of fifteen seconds.

Kobalt instead prefers to focus on the challenges of real people with real projects. Building a plane, for example: what comes up must come down. Thus it’s an unspoken conclusion that any tools put to that use must be ineffably reliable.

Jonathan used the analogy of movies and special effects to elaborate. Long after special effects or sensationalist concepts become old hat, in the end the best stories will keep bringing people back for another screening.

A four-minute commercial will not hold a customer’s interest for even two minutes. A real person’s story will.

Arguably, the Artisans series isn’t necessarily even meant so much to reach new customers as it is meant to strengthen Kobalt’s bond with existing customers.

Either way, social media was vital for the series to take off.

Despite the size of Lowes, Kobalt is still considered a small company with a comparatively small marketing budget compared to their competitors. As a result, they decided to focus on customer-service.

Connecting with users over social media was a large part of their strategy. So was the goal of having a response time of less than 24 hours, no matter who contacted them or where.

By engaging with their customers, the company also stumbled upon something entirely unexpected.

Sometimes Kobalt encounters ideas for extra features or entirely new products when they see someone using their tools in a way they didn’t anticipate.

Hearing from customers – especially customers confident enough even to modify their own tools for specialized projects – is almost worth an entire concepting department.

It’s mind-blowing when customers start showing off their garages or their hobbies, too. Kobalt often gets credited in posts showing off gorgeous tables or restored cars. They weren’t physically there, but their tools were. Thus, they had a part in making those things come to fruition.

Customers tag Kobalt because they feel like the entire Kobalt family was a part of their project.

“I didn’t make that table,” Jonathan points out. But whether or not the company knew they were along for the ride, “we signed up for it by selling them a product.”

“If you’re offering something nobody needs, you’re not going to move it…so let them tell you what they need first.”

Not every B2B manufacturer can afford to begin with a massive longform video series. And not every business would necessarily benefit from one.

Even planning isn’t always the answer. A year ago, the Kobalt Artisans series didn’t exist as so much as a writers’ room concept. It was inspired solely by the customers

The Kobalt Artisans series is an example of when a company discovered what they were good at, then built up a campaign and is now running full-speed-ahead with it.

Bradshaw’s advice to industrial marketers? Crawl first; then walk; then run.

Figure out what you want to discuss with your customer, and learn how that two-way interaction works. Once you learn what they’re doing with your product, then you can begin improving it, giving them what they want, and increasing engagement.

Business is no longer about customers adapting to companies. It’s about about companies adapting to customers.

“Try something. Do something different,” Jonathan suggested. “Continue to expound and learn; and be willing to change.”

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!

This week on IndustrialSage, we address a common question about digital marketing for your company. When should you bring it in-house, and when should you outsource digital marketing to an agency?

An in-house team is ideal when your field is so specific and niched that an outsider can’t properly create content with the right nuances, politics, and technical details.

Insourcing takes less time to onboard your marketers and make sure they understand your product and your business. Their time is more often spent determining what marketing tools or techniques to use.

Nanolumens is a great example of how insourcing can (and often does) originate. Their company didn’t have a marketing department at all. They just had the front receptionist, who started experimenting bit by bit with digital assets, like Marketo.

From there, they ended up building out an entire internal strategy and team over time.

So if you have the opportunity and an individual who you think might excel at promoting your company this way, you can assign them a few minor projects to try in their spare time.

Remember, the baby steps can be just that. Small. Make it a goal to send out regular newsletters. Try creating a email campaigns in preparation for a trade show. Crawl before you can walk.

Outsourcing is good when you need professional help from an agency to generate results and catch up to your competition a.s.a.p.

When your company has a low bandwidth or a lack of any computer-savvy individuals, hiring outside help for your digital marketing is a very helpful option.

Agencies can be pricy, but don’t forget the old adage: “If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur.”

Someone who understands the digital world can omit the trial-and-error delays that may come with experimenting internally with marketing techniques.

However, it’s still good to have at least one individual who’s your internal go-to contact to mediate between you and the agency. The more niche your field, the more you’ll need someone to help explain to the marketers what you do and who you want to attract. That way, the content won’t be too vague or irrelevant.

A lot of companies do both.

Many industries turn to outside agencies for PR, digital campaigns, ads, and offerings. Meanwhile, they have an internal department that churns out most of their social media content, their email newsletters, and maybe their blogs.

Sometimes a company’s internal marketing is handled by one person. Other times, there’s a dozen or more members of a team on the company payroll. Meanwhile there could be a whole outside agency looking after them…or just one digital guru who understands their business in and out.

It all comes down to, when you begin the digital marketing process, asking yourself one key question.

“Do we want an industry expert who’s not sure how marketing works…or a marketing expert who’s not sure how our industry works?”

Ideally you want to have someone who will eventually understand both. And that should be what you’ll achieve and grow over time. But we’ve all got to start somewhere.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to get each of our weekly episodes sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

If there’s a particular topic that you’d like for us to talk about, or if you have a particular a challenge that you’d like us to take a crack at, send us an email. We’d be happy to answer them for you – and if your topic gets picked for a future episode, you’ll win a free IndustrialSage t-shirt!